


Rich Times and Horrors

by StellarRequiem



Series: Retcon of the Sith [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: AU in which Anakin's characterization actually aligns with Vader's, Alternate title: George Lucas totally could have had his cake and eaten it too, Episode II, Gen, WITHOUT subtracting 90 percent of the characterization we expected to see in Anakin based on Vader, ambitious calculating and intense anakin, and here's the proof, and kept with the plot he wanted for the prequels, older anakin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 00:27:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5606776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The beginning of the downfall of Anakin Skywalker in a universe redesigned around his original backstory and characterization, as laid out in the novelization (and script) of Return of the Jedi. </p><p>References Episode II and re-imagines elements of Episode III around an Anakin  whose actions and motivations actually demonstrate the kind of characterization that made Darth Vader so formidable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

It was a face full of meanings, that Luke would forever recall. Regret, he saw most plainly. And shame. Memories could be seen flashing across it … memories of rich times. And horrors. And love, too.

\-- James Kahn, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

pg. 174

* * *

 

Something like this was bound to happen eventually, he consoles himself as he vaults over their cover, blaster fire ringing in his ears, his lightsaber coming to life with a growl. After the first attempt on Padmé’s life, that this sort of chaotic moment was imminent had been obvious. And he’d sworn to deal with it very simply, pledging _whatever means necessary._ Of course, he hadn’t been thinking of the ramifications of that promise when he’d made it, because he’d been thinking of the copper taste of rage and the cold feeling of terror because he could have _lost_ her, and had been preoccupying himself with clutching her delicate hands in his and kissing the backs of her knuckles. And the insides of her wrists. And then her mouth, with a smile that came to his face so suddenly that it felt as if it had cut him open to get there, a little like he’d come undone at a weak seam, because she’d had an idea: A _trap_.

Which is how he’d ended up pinned down, surrounded by a security detachment armed only with blasters and natural, unimpressive speed. The man who’d been beside him behind the railing had been bleeding from the shoulder, grimacing and struggling pathetically to lift his blaster with his non-dominant hand instead when Anakin realized that it was time for the something he'd been both dreading and wanting for weeks.

“Stay down,” Anakin told him, right before he’d leapt into the fray.

“But Captain—”

The protest follows him as he goes, fading to nothing behind the din of battle and the air crackling around his lightsaber. It occurs to him as he swings—grimacing and then grinning as adrenaline screams into his brain and the _ecstasy_ of fighting makes itself known for the first time in too long outside of training, a delicious, gratifying siren’s song—that this may be the last time he gets to wield it. He’s not actually supposed to _have_ it, after all. And it occurs to him too late that Obi-Wan will take the fall for this, too. He shouldn’t have the lightsaber because Obi-Wan shouldn’t have given it to him, given that he was never sanctioned to train Anakin in the first place. Too late now. He’s not going to watch his detail, that twenty-year old overzealous idiot with the bleeding arm and his other comrades, die because he has something to hide. _Many_ somethings to hide.

Including how much more he loves watching one of their attackers stumble as he cuts his weapon from his grip, soldering the now-shortened barrel shut as the lightsaber moves through it. The man’s hand slips toward a secondary weapon at his hip. Anakin tries so hard not to look as gratified as he feels by the gesture. This is real combat, with contingency plans, with risk that’s intoxicating . . . His lightsaber sings, wild and ravenous in his hands, asking only to be told where to go and where to strike to make the most of the blow.

He brings it down where his opponent’s neck meets his shoulder. The man drops, headless, to the floor.

Anakin is able to take three more on his own before his detachment stops gawking and reengages. Of the seven attackers remaining, they kill six, and are able to take one as a prisoner. Success tastes sweet and heady on his tongue.

 


	2. Chapter 2

_Oh, Anakin, just stop talking._

He doesn’t, of course. He stands defiant before the council, back straight, fists closed at his sides, voice quiet and calm with just a little bit of an edge to it that suggests how truly sharp he is. Obi-Wan wishes he’d make that just a little less obvious—they’re in enough trouble as it is without Anakin flashing his colder, harder angles at the entire council. Obi-Wan has gotten to know those angles all too well since they started training, and he knows what they are—dangerous, and frightening. Working on softening them should have been the next step: quelling the rage. And (just as he’d predicted,) the lust.

The _lust._

Neither of them has mentioned Padmé. Fortunately, it looks as if they won’t have to.

_A Jedi who’s . . . what was I thinking?_

Really, there isn’t a rule Obi-Wan _hasn’t_ broken in Anakin. Except perhaps his nobility. For all his defiance, he’s unrelentingly self-sacrificing, hardly permitting Obi-Wan to speak. He drives into the council unrelentingly. He even _accuses_ them of . . . _gatekeeping_ is the best word for what he describes as he counters their demands—to know whether he has any respect for the order he has mascaraed as—by mercilessly disparaging the inaccessibility of the order—as it stands—to those most worthy and capable of joining it. _Easy, Anakin . . ._

Of those who would love most to.

Yoda shakes his head, all ears.

“Have nothing to do with it, love must,” he admonishes.

“With all due respect, if that is the case, then how anyone should hope to learn that it’s so with your doors closed is beyond me. The only thing Master Obi-Wan,” a strange thing, still, to be called by his dearest friend, “has done here is nurture the equality inherent to the Force, which _this_ council has ignored.”

“Do you think you are some kind of special case?” Mace Windu’s words are growing clipped. He either loves Anakin, or is going to execute him.

_We’re doomed._

“You’d never have known if I were,” Anakin retorts. “I would never have been welcome before this council . . .  just as I’m not welcome now.’

For the first time in his life, Obi-Wan is terribly tempted to faint.

“Enough,” Yoda orders. He excuses Anakin graciously, as obtuse as he’s capable of being behind the even words. Obi-Wan, though, he asks to stay.

 

( o )

 

It’s a different dynamic, training under the council’s watchful eyes. They don’t like him. There’s a reverence to what they do that he loves, that he clings to as Obi-Wan sends him closer and closer to the edge of irritated insanity by pestering—at Yoda’s urging—about his _anger_ and his _desire. Desire_ is all he’s ever had. He desired to live, so he did. He desired to be free, and he was. He desired Padmé, and he’d had her.

The last time he’d escorted her to Naboo, he’d _married her._

A wedded Jedi. He’d be _everything_ they’d despise, if they only knew.

But he _is_ a Jedi. He’d wanted that, too, and now it’s his. He’s no knight, yet, he’s a learner, still, just a skilled one, and he knows that as well as he knows anything: he’s a learner, and he will be for a long while yet. Sand is dry. Learning takes forever by the council’s standards. These are facts of living more universal and indisputable than the force. But he _is_ a Jedi. And it means more to him than freedom, than breathing, than _flying,_ than anything but her.

That truth in and of itself is very nearly enough to alleviate the grinding, searing feeling of the council’s eyes on his every movement, of their constant, scalding scrutiny. He feels like they’re slowly roasting him, setting him on fire little by little to test whether he’s strong enough and willful enough to survive, or if they can erase every trace of him and reduce his defiance to ash. Anakin doesn’t intend to give them the satisfaction.

 _They’re afraid of you,_ he consoles himself, when the heat becomes unbearable. _And they should be._

Maybe he’ll give them a reason to be. Perhaps he'll just become the greatest Jedi the galaxy has ever known—strong enough to defeat them all. Or protect them. A knight to defend a universe.

 _They_ should _be._

 


	3. Chapter 3

After it happens, he goes to Palpatine. Anakin had met the aging senator through Padmé, guarding him along with her on more than one occasion. He’s one of the few people who could make her shy, her respect for him a sort of wariness. She’s never liked the way he smiles.

That, and she’s fought him hard on more than half the points that two senators from the same world might have been expected to agree upon. Anakin enjoys sitting in on their private debates, her unsanctioned Jedi protector admiring from the doorway as her determination boils over the rims of her tiny frame, boldness bouncing in her curls, stubborn defiance turning warm eyes hot. She never looks at Anakin during these exchanges.

Palpatine does, and he’s pulled the younger man aside on more than one occasion with a bright, scalding spark in his eye as if he _knows,_ the same way Obi-Wan had the first time he’d seen them together. As disturbing as that should be, it’s made it easier to trust him: as if the fact that Palpatine's unrelenting and honest utilitarianism is a breath of fresh air amidst the smothering hypocrisy of the council weren’t enough already.

In any case, it’s _trust_ that finds Anakin in his office, not the temple, once it’s done.

“Did it feel good?” the senator asks him, with a quiet kind of eagerness. A curiosity that basks in its own phrasing.

“ _Good?_ I killed a man _with the Force—”_

“And did you _like_ it?”

“I . . . “ Anakin pauses, then snarls. “Of course I did. You can’t imagine what that much power . . . _feels_ like. But—”

Palpatine hums to himself, cutting Anakin off. He lets him.

“Tell me,” Palpatine orders.

And Anakin shouldn’t. But he does. And his audience listens with rapturous silence, euphoria in his eyes and parted, patient mouth. And it feels almost as good as the act itself, to relive it this way, at someone else’s mercy, the rolls of predator and prey reversed. This is a vulnerability, he knows. A weakness that he’s just shown—blackmail-worthy and dark. Easily as horrific what he’d done on a desert planet in the evening shadows of binary suns with his mother’s feather-light body and weighted, damaged soul still heavy in his palms. Simpler, cleaner, but just as dark. A single choke with something so _alive_ as the Force behind it—it’s _twisted_. Demented.

Indulgent, in its way.

He’d felt _life_ leaving the perpetrator he’d disarmed. Felt it warm and swirling around his outstretched fingers. Felt his throat crush shut against his palm though there were feet of air between them. The man had already dropped his blaster. Anakin had killed him anyway.

And it had felt so terribly good. Electric. Talking about it leaves him charged, stiffening against the aftershocks and—somewhere beneath the confusion and euphoria mixing in his brain with all the heady impact of wine from his wedding night—the realization of what he’s done. The horror and the shock.

“Do you think you’ll do this again?” Palpatine asks, so steady, even with his teeth sinking into his lip, with a shift in his voice’s pitch.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Of course you shouldn’t, young Skywalker,” he chuckles. “But that doesn’t answer the question, does it?”

He’s right, of course. And it is, after all, such a gratuitous relief to admit it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I usually don't do notes, because I feel like it's silly to justify my writing. . . but I am going to justify my writing. For anyone who noticed what could be construed as suspicious subtext::
> 
> I submit "Vader’s pulse and breathing were machine-regulated, so they could not quicken; but something in his chest became more electric around his meetings with the Emperor; he could not say how. A feeling of fullness, of power, of dark and demon mastery— of secret lusts, unrestrained passion, wild submission— all these things were in Vader’s heart as he neared his Emperor. These things and more." (Kahn, James. Return of the Jedi: Star Wars: Episode VI p. 55.) as evidence that any and all suspicious looking subtext in this chapter is, in fact, 100% Lucas approved and CANON suspicious subtext. Just, you know, for the record.


	4. Chapter 4

Anakin is slipping: something has changed, and little by little, Obi-Wan is losing him. Or, at least, losing the man he was when they’d met. Age alone can’t account for the shift. Nor can the scar on his cheek. Even the weight of war doesn’t speak to the kind of shift that he’s sensing somewhere out of the peripheral of his feelings; those far edges he prefers not to search. If Anakin has any reaction to the constant pressure of war, it’s that he’s exhilarated by it. And that is, perhaps, the most disturbing part.

( o )

Padmé is slipping from him. She’s found herself on the wrong side of a petty fight in the midst of such a wider war, and she’s slipping.  She’s wild. She’s frantic. She’s furious. Anakin returns home from battlefields and armies for precious days and weeks at a time and when he does he doesn’t dare speak of politics, for if he does, the only way to predict her response is to imagine the reaction of someone else. Someone _less_ than herself. Someone naive, and uncertain. Someone who would dare utter such dangerous ideas as _doubting_ which side of the war they’re on, of questioning the chancellor, and his authority. But even as the world around her shakes its head at her outspokenness, as Palpatine—one of few who might have shared her Naboo-born naivety, were he not bearing the brunt of it instead—shakes his head, she looks at Anakin as if _he_ were the one who no longer makes sense. She no longer understands his fears, or his fury: How much he dreads never making it home again to see her. How hard he fights to ensure that he does. And when he meets her again in their bed she kisses him—does everything to him—like she’s furious, and holds him as though she were scared.

And he can’t take the hypocrisy of it, these things that she can’t—she won’t—see, these wrongful doubts she harbors, and how alone it leaves him. He lies awake beside her. Sleepless, tossing and turning, remembering their wedding. Remembering the risk and how sweet it had tasted.

He could‘ve been caught.

He didn’t care.

They couldn’t take this from him. She was his, she _is_ his, for all their head-butting. She was, and is, the one thing he will never give up, this woman he loves. His Padmé. Like so many things, patience, composure, he can feign chastity before the insufferable council, and he doesn’t regret hiding her. Only losing her. Which he feels like he is.

 “Are we really doing the right thing, anymore?” she whispers against her Jedi-soldier’s chest in the silent hours before dawn. “So much has changed . . . And I—”

“Have likewise changed?” he doesn’t mean to snap. But he does. And then he just _asks_. Asks outright how she, of all people, could be guilty of such wild hypocrisy as _doubt_.

Padmé shoots upright in bed, driving the heel of her hand into his breastbone, glowering down at him with fire and ice and the distant glint of city lights all sparking in her eyes.

“I have every right to second guess myself,” she says, too royal, too even-tempered, for him to quite call it a hiss.

“But why would you want to?”

Padmé’s grinding teeth slip free of each other with a grating click that’s loud in the quiet bedroom, the sound followed by a sigh.

“Because I care about my people,” she says, “and what I lead them into. The same as you care for your men.”

But that’s where she’s wrong. There _are_ things he cares for in this life, deeply. Her. His few friends. His freedom. His triumph.  But soldiers—soldiers, like him, have orders. They have the possibility of death, and it’s no one’s duty to protect them: it’s theirs to protect everyone else, and so _care_ isn’t quite the right word. He can’t _care_. He’s grown too vicious, and too numb, and he doesn't  _care_ when he loses men: he fights past it. Uses battle as a drug.

But he doesn’t want to tell her that.

“I’m sorry,” he says in a rush instead, not entirely sure how he means it. And Anakin pulls her down, himself up—and devours her pretty mouth.

Like fighting, like flying, kissing her means feeling alive, and it’s _addicting_. He wants more, he wants _more_ . . . He doesn’t know how to stop.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s been difficult not to notice the change in how he fights. Show of force, relentlessness, and recklessness aren’t surprising attributes in Anakin—

But the _brutality._

Anakin tears into his opponents. He’s become a wicked dualist, fast and cold, varying forms with liquid fluidity, cutting down oppositions with vicious efficiency. A jab here, a slice there—he blocks blasts that he reflects back into the barrels that birthed them. He’s . . . _ruthless._

“Aren’t we fighting to win, old friend?” Obi-Wan presses him as he sends an already disarmed enemy over a fifty foot ledge with a kick to her stomach.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Anakin sounds demanding, but not irritated. He’s far too high of the adrenaline of yet another battle for that. He loves fighting. He loves the whistle and burn and hum of his lightsaber, the blue flash and blur in dark hallways between blaster sparks.

“Only that I’m surprised at you. We’re fighting to end the conflict, not for conquest. You would do well to keep that in mind . . . padawan.” The word isn’t a jab, but a shrugged reminder. That Anakin is still—technically—a learner is so strange a truth to say aloud in times like these that it feels almost like a violation of their friendship to remind him of it. But perhaps he needs it.

 Anakin shakes his head. His lightsaber disappears with a fading snarl and a snap.

“Is there really a difference?” he asks. The question hits Obi-Wan squarely in the center of his chest in a way he doesn’t fully understand.

“Of course it does.”

( o )

“He’s policing me,” Anakin begins, before biting down on his own tongue. “Well, no . . . But it  _feels_ like he is, though what he’s saying usually isn’t unreasonable. I don’t understand it.”

“Don’t you?”

Anakin shakes his head. Palpatine is helpful in the sense that he pushes him, sometimes, in the opposite direction, forcing him to defend against his own irritation with Obi-Wan.

“What do you mean?” His voice sounds more frustrated to his own ears than it does demanding, as he’d intended it to. The failure boils over in his brain, churning and bubbling. Misspeaking in front of Palpatine is like giving the older man an opening without making him ask for it. Without _Anakin_ asking. Without having  earned the insight, or seen it freely given.

“Calm yourself, young Skywalker,” he warns, and Anakin’s anger sparks and bubbles from his head down into his chest, where it festers deliciously. “You know what I mean. Answer the question.”

Anakin could fight him. But it tastes better to obey. He’s being allowed the opportunity to vent the concerns that a distracted Padmé hadn’t been able to hear when he’d tried to tell her, first. Something is wrong with her. What, he doesn’t know. Yet.

He shouldn’t waste this moment by resisting for the sake of it.

“I’m a learner,” Anakin insists.

“When you ought to be a lord.” The old Chancellor’s tone is smug, and he continues before Anakin has a chance to correct _lord_ to  _master._  “But what are they teaching you?”

“A good question, sir,” Anakin retorts instead. Palpatine chuckles, then stops. The sound fades away into a despairing hum.

“It is indeed,” he says, as if bemoaning some great travesty, “isn’t it? But come—tell me about the battle that so frightened your master.”

Anakin does.


	6. Chapter 6

The next complaint Anakin brings before The Chancellor is harder to back away from, harder to turn into a defense.  It’s mere days after their last talk, and there have been no new battles to report, except for the shouting match that had broken up Anakin and Obi-Wan’s sparring that morning. _That_ is what brings him.

“You don’t require his approval,” Palpatine chides. _Approval,_ in this case, to launch a new offensive . . . this one against pro-federation splinters in their own ranks. “ _I will not be a part of a witch hunt, nor will the council condone it!”_ had been Obi-Wan’s final, furiously appalled word on the matter. And is, most likely, what prompts Anakin’s choice of retort.

 “I do require the Council’s,” he snarls. Palpatine’s silver brows fly up his forehead, pushing new wrinkles and seams into his chalky skin.

“You feel they constrain you,” he says. It’s an observation, not a question.

“Of course I do.”

There’s no part of his life the Council _doesn’t_ strangle. His wife. His decisions. His victories. His _training_ , the training that could have saved his mother, that—

“You know better than them,” Palpatine informs him, voice lowering to something near a hiss. “You know this to be true.”

“I do,” Anakin affirms. “Or at least, I want to.” To know better. To prove that he does.

That’s what he says to a thoughtful Palpatine, what he commits himself to, right before the truth.

“If only,” the old man says, the rueful serpent’s coil of a smile at the edge of his mouth, “there were some other way to teach you.”

 ( ( o ) )

“Hunted” is the word Palpatine uses, for what happened to the Sith. And he would know: he’s one of their Order, after all. The _last_ of them.  He tells Anakin this with mournful, then vicious, then perfect _calm._ Says all this to him and _waits_ like a creature in a web.

“I have to tell the Council,” is still how Anakin finally decides to respond.

“You may,” Palpatine sighs, “though it will do you no good. Nor them. Nor the war.”

Anakin’s heart sinks so low that he can feel his stomach scalding it.

“It wouldn’t.”

“But you will do what you must,” Palpatine affirms, sighing for a moment before another of his wicked smiles curls the far corner of his mouth. “Go. Do it, young Skywalker; see what it does for you.”

“No.”

“No?”

Anakin’s fist tightens on his thigh, clenched around an imaginary hilt, as if his lightsaber could save him from the debacle before him now, or from the immense appeal of insatiable, Force-compelled curiosity. Anakin can feel it moving in his every thought, sparking as he formulates his words. Despite everything he knows of the dark, no part of the light tells him to run.

“No,” he reasserts. “Because you’re right. I won’t ask you to explain it to them, until you’ve explained it to me. Tell me: Why choose the dark?”

Palpatine laughs.

“The better question,” he says, voice sliding and electric, “is why you’ve chosen something so restrictive and hypocritical as ‘ _light._ ’ But you yourself are curious about that, aren’t you . . .. Would you like to hear a story, Padawan? A legend of the Sith that your masters would never tell you?”

“If it answers my question,” Anakin says. It feels, in the strangest way, like a challenge instead of an affirmation. “Tell me whatever you like.”

“Yes—you _want_ to know . . .”

Want, want, _want—_ of course he does. All he’s ever _done_ is want. There is no point in lying about that, he knows. The words resonate. It’s that simple. He _does want._

“ . . . Tell me.”

( ( o ) )

It’s a strange sort of peace that they establish, the last Sith Lord and the young Jedi. Anakin keeps his secret, listens to his logic. Plays with the taste—decadent and addicting—of a philosophy so different from everything that he knows. And it lasts, for a while, that odd arrangement.

And then the Jedi bring him their suspicions, regarding the chancellor . . . and the dark.

“Tell them whatever you must,” Palpatine tells him, utterly dismissive.

“That’s ludicrous—”

“ _Tell them!”_

Palpatine snaps, voice cold and strange and as intoxicatingly deadly, it resonates in the same manner as a lightsaber in the still air of his office. “Do it. Test them. See what your Jedi masters are capable of.”

And Anakin _does._


	7. Chapter 7

They’d asked him to be a spy, and now they’re asking him to become a murderer.

As if he wasn’t one already.

Master Windu corners Palpatine on his own: _“If he’s as peaceable as you’ve said,”_ was his explanation for doing so, though vengeance is what seems to be on his mind. Something personal, something enjoyed—Anakin can’t clearly read his feelings. The room is too clouded with hate. His. Palpatine’s. Windu’s. Palpatine’s again, all tangled up with joy as electric as the sparks flying from his hands.

The encounter had escalated quickly, and simply. Palpatine had goaded Windu into it. Windu had been happy to accept, though he’d been surprised, apparently, by Anakin’s unwillingness to attack his friend, his mentor. This dark being who’s never tried to hurt him, though it occurs to him that Palpatine wouldn’t mind doing so, if it suited him. But Anakin can understand that logic. It fits, somehow, in a way morality can’t and shouldn’t bother to justify.

“Skywalker!”

It’s Windu that shouts at him, a blade between him and the bolts. Palpatine—collapsed near the broken window—is shooting lightning so much a part of him that he seems incapable of generating anything else—including speech to plead for help—while producing it. He’s weak, in a way, like this. Exposed from angles the arcing blue sparks don’t cover . . .

“No,” is Anakin’s answer. “He’s done nothing wrong.”

“His existence is wrong.”

Windu raises a hand, resistance and effort pulling lines into his young, dark face, holding off the bolts an inch from his palm, and swings his lightsaber over his head, prepared to swing—at other angles. Straight down.

If Anakin speaks, he doesn’t hear himself. He lunges without thought.

Windu’s lightsaber, a bright purple blur against the half-dark of the light-speckled city out the window, tumbles away with his hand still closed around it. Anakin takes it off almost at the elbow.

What happens next is momentarily baffling.

Master Windu falters, shouts. His defensive hand falls to clutch the cauterized stump of his other arm, setting free the wild electricity of the Sith below him. It continues to fly from pale fingers, a few more bolts before he drops his hands, either gritting his teeth or smiling or both. And they hit. They hit home, striking the heart, and the Jedi Master tumbles, limp, from the window.

Anakin feels, rather than sees, him hit something—likely a speeder—passing below. Feels the thud and the slide. And the beginning of what is to come.

“What have you done?” he demands. Palpatine laughs.

“What have you?”

“Spared your life, as you should ha—”

“As you have spared so many others?” His voice turns mocking, then vicious. “Oh _merciful_ young Skywalker.”

Anakin grits his teeth. Returns his lightsaber to its place on his belt.

“Tell me,” Palpatine gloats, “how do you really feel? Go on—search your feelings. Tell me the truth.”

Anakin closes his hands into shaking fists at his sides.

He feels justified.


	8. Chapter 8

The _criminalization,_ the _investigation,_ of the Jedi Order. Nothing has ever sounded so foreign. Padmé weeps about it openly and angrily. Obi-Wan, meanwhile, is nothing but sick, and stunned. And the sickness isn’t even a result of what Chancellor Palpatine is saying—as stomach turning as this announcement is—but the result of some far worse knowing that won’t let him go. Anakin stands beside him, ridged, but _he_ isn’t horrified.

“I’ve ensured the Chancellor knows you weren’t involved,” he assures Obi-Wan under his breath, sensing his discomfort. There’s nothing consolatory about the tone of the words, the sentence as icy as an order.

“That isn’t my concern.”

“Then what is?”

Obi-Wan pauses, aghast, and knowing that the emotion shows on his face and in Anakin’s all-too-keen senses. _How could you have to ask? How could you dare to?_

So Obi-Wan begins slowly, desperate for any indication that his Padawan, his friend, his dearest, bright-eyed companion hasn’t really died so much inside in the course of war and conflict and in the face of power that he really, truly can’t comprehend what’s so wrong about this. And, more than anything, what’s so wrong about the encounter he himself had witnessed.

“They say . . . that Master Windu had been disarmed before he fell. By a Jedi weapon.” He cannot, for some reason, bring himself to say _lightsaber._ The image that goes with that word—blue, closed tightly in Anakin’s fingers—is far too clear. “The investigation says he was missing his hand . . . Anakin.”

“Then perhaps he shouldn’t have forced mine,” Anakin sneers. He doesn’t so much as turn his head in Obi-Wan’s direction, twin-sun eyes fixed with scalding intensity on Palpatine speaking below them, but Obi-Wan feels it: a fury almost like hate. Far, far too much like hate.

To Anakin’s left, Padmé recoils, a hand pressed to her stomach, the blood draining from her face. She opens her mouth to speak, the words shaped like a horrified gasp and like snarl, but stops short. _She feels it, too._ The feeling, white-hot to the point of freezing; it stops Obi-Wan’s heart. Hate turned cold.

_No—_

Obi-Wan gasps despite himself. Still, Anakin doesn’t look up. He just stands there, bathing them both in cold.

Terrible cold.

* * *

 

END OF ACT II

 

* * *

 


End file.
